Bring Up the Kid’s Happy Feeling It’s no surprise that Jennifer Senior’s insightful, provocative magazine cover story, "I Lo

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问题                     Bring Up the Kid’s Happy Feeling
    It’s no surprise that Jennifer Senior’s insightful, provocative magazine cover story, "I Love My Children, I Hate My Life" is arousing much chatter—nothing gets people talking like the suggestion that child rearing is anything less than a completely fulfilling, life-enriching experience. Rather than concluding that children make parents either happy or miserable, Senior suggests we need to redefine happiness: instead of thinking of it as something that can be measured by moment-to-moment joy, we should consider being happy as a past-tense condition. Even though the day-to-day experience of raising kids can be soul-crushingly hard, Senior writes that "the very things that in the moment dampen our moods can later be sources of intense gratification and delight."
    The magazine cover showing an attractive mother holding a cute baby is hardly the only Madonna-and-child image on newsstands this week. There are also stories about newly adoptive—and newly single—mom Sandra Bullock, as well as the usual "Jennifer Aniston is pregnant" news. Practically every week features at least one celebrity mom, or mom-to-be, smiling on the newsstands.
    In a society that so persistently celebrates procreation, is it any wonder that admitting you regret having children is equivalent to admitting you support kitten-killing? It doesn’t seem quite fair, then, to compare the regrets of parents to the regrets of the chidless. Unhappy parents rarely are provoked to wonder if they shouldn’t have had kids, but unhappy childless folks are bothered with the message that children are the single most important thing in the world: obviously their misery must be a direct result of the gaping baby-size holes in their lives.
    Of course, the image of parenthood that celebrity magazines like US Weekly and People present is hugely unrealistic, especially when the parents are single mothers like Bullock. According to several studies concluding that parents are less happy than childless couples, single parents are the least happy of all. No shock there, considering how much work it is to raise a kid without a partner to lean on; yet to hear Sandra and Britney tell it, raising a kid on their "own" (read: with round-the-clock help) is a piece of cake.
    It’s hard to imagine that many people are dumb enough to want children just because Reese and Angelina make it look so glamorous : most adults understand that a baby is not a haircut. But it’s interesting to wonder if the images we see every week of stress-free, happiness-enhancing parenthood aren’t in some small, subconscious way contributing to our own dissatisfactions with the actual experiene, in the same way that a small part of us hoped getting "the Rachel" might make us look just a little bit like Jennifer Aniston.
According to Paragraph 4, the message conveyed by celebrity magazines is______.

选项 A、soothing
B、ambiguous
C、compensatory
D、misleading

答案D

解析 推理判断题。直接定位至第四段。首句指出,当然,像《美国周刊》和《人物》这样的明星杂志上刊登的父母形象是极为不现实的,尤其是像布洛克一样的单身母亲的形象。首句中的hugely unrealistic表明她们的形象与现实不同。末句给出具体例证,进一步表明杂志刊登的消息不真实,所以会误导读者,故[D]“误导的”为答案。前三段作者给出了杂志上的一系列明星妈妈的形象,在第四段首句作者就杂志上名人父母的形象提出自己的看法。作者认为这一形象与实际不符并引用了项研究结果说明自己的观点。既然是hugely unrealistic,也就不可能给人以安慰,排除[A]“令人安慰的”。这里明确指出杂志上刊登的消息的性质,并非含糊不清,故排除[B]“含糊不清的”。文中没有涉及补偿问题,故[C]“补偿性的”无依据,应排除。
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